alexbanks

> If you're looking in from the outside,

It's weird, then, that the person that wrote the article that you and I are both commenting on has written a well regarded book using Haskell and their assertion is exactly the same as mine, no? It's also weird that the subject of this article is meant to be Rust, and yet here we are debating the idea that "Devs just aren't smart enough to understand haskell".

But, as always, I wouldn't expect a conversation about Haskell to really go anywhere. You can't comment unless you've drank the kool aid, and if you've drank the kool aid you're required to spout the same rhetoric.

Every time Haskell is discussed, lots of valid critiques show up as to why it's not more successful, and yet every single time, without fail, the conversation devolves heavily into "People aren't smart enough." The person I was responding to literally said that Haskell wouldn't catch on because most developers aren't smart enough, and then defined "smart" as those three things.

I am arguing a series of things. First, that being "smart" does not always mean those three things. Second, that being "smart" does not mean that you'd care to learn Haskell. Third, to suggest a tool isn't catching on because the members of the programming community aren't "smart" enough is so masturbatory it's actually insane. God forbid Haskell isn't catching on because of all the valid critiques that show up in every one of these threads and then gets dismissed under this same "Haskell smart" rhetoric.

Haskell will not catch on because the community thinks it is too smart to have to actually accommodate the programming community. Simple as that.

Is this not the exact definition of a cowpath argument? "We didn't make it to be this way so, regardless of what people are actually using it for, we will continue to assume we're right and the users are wrong"?

If HTML is no longer being used the way it was intended, is it unreasonable to request A.) A replacement, or B.) an HTML upgrade?

A quick google search shows a pretty typical layered corporate structure.

/r/programming, /r/haskell, this site, interactions with real people at Haskell meetups and normal programming meetups.

smart adjective, smart·er, smart·est.

- having or showing quick intelligence or ready mental capability

They said "smart", I said "intelligence".

Purely anecdotally, I've found haskell-centric spaces to be pretty hostile, which definitely did not help getting me interested.

> drive, intellectual curiosity and desire for a challenge

literally none of these is related to intelligence.

And even if they did, to assert that not wanting to learn Haskell has anything to do with "drive, intellectual curiosity and desire for a challenge" is ridiculous. There are a million reasons a person that exhibits all three of those qualities could opt not to.

And the layers and layers and layers between Netflix' CEO and non executives probably mean he has almost no idea what he's talking about wrt general employees.

I've posted this before, but first bell was at 7:18, bus was at 6:30. I had it luckier in that I lived ~1 mile from school, but lived in an area where you couldn't safely walk. There were students that lived ~15 miles from school whose buses arrived ~5:45 to be able to make the 7:18 bell.

Our lunch was split up into 3 to accommodate the amount of students our school had. If you unluckily got put into Phase 1, lunch was at 10:48.

Came to post. Teenagers aren't the totally irrational monsters television/media makes them out to me, necessarily. As one could guess, they're very much a reflection of their parents' investment in their emotional health and growth.

Purely anecdotally, none of the children I've been around that had thoughtful/respectful/logical parents have gone through the mindless rebellion phase - they've all been very level headed reasonable people in their teens. On the flipside, all of the children of mindless authoritarian parents have gone kinda wild pretty much as soon as they developed the agency to do so. It's kind of sad that (at least in the US) we've painted teenagers as some kind of psychotic monster that needs tamed.

_Exactly_. Tech companies regularly exist purely based off of illegal business models (they call them _Disruptions_).

So, yes, we agree, if there are repercussions for a company regularly breaking the law, then engineers can and should refuse work that has negative legal or moral repercussions. But in the world of tech, that's not the case.

I can't edit my comment but replace Majority with Minority and that's what I meant.

I agree with you, but my point is that you're the dramatic majority. Their revenue proves it. So, in 2020, even though their reviews are all garbage and spam, does it matter to them? I again ask, now, based on their data, what benefit it poses to them?

I think that might've been true a decade ago. Now I think it's Best Buy and Walmart that are attempting to gain credibility against Amazon, no?

> I think we are pretending here that these developers have only one option: "Sure, boss! Whatever you say, boss!"

No, I am suggesting that there is significantly more grey area between your moral highground and reality.

> I personally believe that you, the software developer typing in the code, should hold yourself personally accountable for what you are typing in

Yep.

> This "well, boss told me to do it!" rationalization and blame-shifting is how we get dangerous and unethical software.

It really is a strange world that, when corporations are attempting to turn profit on illegal behavior, it's the meaningless bodies-in-seats that we're trying to hold accountable.

I am, and have been, repeatedly, suggesting that the lowest level cannot be held accountable without holding the rest of the levels accountable. Jailing engineers for doing things their companies demanded of them is ridiculous if you're not also jailing those doing the demanding. I'm kind of shocked this isn't painfully obvious.

> And, yes, I have quit software jobs where I was asked to write software I considered ethically questionable, and failed to change the boss's mind.

Congratulations, that's a level of privilege lots can't afford.

What benefit does Amazon get from spotting and weeding out fake reviews?

> They'd have no qualms stripping me of my license to practice engineering for knowingly approving an unsafe design

Presumably there would be repercussions at the government level if a company repeatedly demanded engineers do things worthy of stripping their licenses though, no?

> My rule of thumb is that if you're dealing with someone 10+ years older than you, it's generally good to assume they can read you better than you can read them.

This is giving a lot of people undue credit, is the problem.

I didn’t think we were talking about life experience, I thought we were talking about the nebulous term “discipline.”

And you’re switching back and forth between “young people”, “children” and now “21 year olds.” I’m trying to understand where this bias comes from, is all.

You’re welcome to disagree about calling them software engineers, but I’m not seeing how that is relevant or constructive to the whole point of this post and comment chain?

Right but we’re not talking about children. We’re talking about recently hired software engineers? And if you’re saying “pretty much every adult”, doesn’t that include those engineers?

Can I ask why you think that young people are inherently less disciplined?

I guess my point is not that engineers should be exempt from being held accountable for their work, but that engineers are frequently asked to do things incorrectly/poorly/negligently and then assessed by their employers for their willingness to comply. Sure, you can say "Just stand up to your employer", but that's an incredibly dismissive stance on a complicated issue. Yes, you should say no to requirements that are flat out illegal, but is it ever that cut and dry? I'd be surprised to find it was ever that simple.

> An engineer should be willing to tell his boss "No, because I would go to jail"

I guess we just fundamentally don't agree on how power dynamics effect these types of scenarios.

You're not wrong, but I disagree a lot with your metaphor. Measuring stress and anxiety is important for mental health. The solutions are not necessarily binary, but the measurement is important.

> Most teachers are not good, so self-study is essential

An excellent cowpath right? "The teachers are bad, so rather than fixing the teachers we make the students teach themselves afterhours."

If the applications of mathematics are not made clear, it is quite literally memorizing random formulas. Which is exactly the scenario you'd find in most public high schools in america.

Which, that sentiment applies directly to history.

> Homework should be abolished

As a child, and now as an adult, I've always thought homework was an insane proposition. If you had a job where you showed up in person for 7 (realistically more than 7) hours a day, but then assigned arbitrary multi-hour long projects afterhours, you'd quit, 1000%.

> In my opinion, 8AM is too early.

First bell for us was 7:18. Meaning the bus showed up at 6:30. Meaning wake up was 5:45.

Looking back, my four years of high school were probably the worst years of my life. I'm glad, at least for a brief minute, current high school students are getting some kind of reprieve.